Sharing adventures of two senior citizens, a fashionable teenage daughter who happens to have Down syndrome and a cabin in the woods! Keeping it Real and Original!

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Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Carnival Fish and Hope

Hope with her Carnival Fish "Rover"

The Fall Festival in our town is going on right now. Ever since Hope started school, the Special Ed kids get to have the carnival area to themselves on Tuesday. The West Side Nut Club sponsors this awesome event and this year the paper reported that 500 kids attended. This year, Hope went with her class and I didn't have to go!

Hope loves to wander. She isn't lost, everyone else is. If she wandered this year, they didn't tell me. I had a great day off!!

Hope loves the games because of the prizes and everything is free that day. In the past, she has come home with huge plastic bags full of stuffies, blow up toys, necklaces, and various trinkets. Just another reason she hoards! She loves her stuff. This year, by the time she got home to our house, all she had in her possession was a gold fish. A real gold fish. Her teacher tried to convince her to take the stuffed animal fish, but Hope insisted on the REAL gold fish. This fish was still alive in its plastic bag at 5:30. I laid the bag in the fish tank so the temp would be the same. I have no clue who taught me that and when Tom saw it, he questioned my intent! He released the fish in the tank and that little devil ate his weight in gold. He was so hungry.

This fish was named Rover. Only because someone wrote Rover on the bag.

When Hope names things, she usually thinks for a while and then names it Cindy. Every time she goes to Build A Bear she picks out a cute animal, dresses it in Disney Character clothes and heads to the birth certificate computer. You would think that if she dressed the bear like Elsa, she would name it Elsa. This is not the case in Hope's world. I cross my figures that the bear will have a cool name like Coco Moco but when I ask, "what is the name?" She always says Cindy!

The first time Hope won a fish at the Fall Festival, Tom wasn't home to take care of it. I did. And guess what? It lived! For some reason this fish got the name Charlotte.Charlotte is the reason that we now have a 20 gallon Fish Tank. It's funny how a free feeder fish from a carnival turns a home into an aquarium totting house equipped with gravel, castles and fake seaweed, lights and a motorized filter. In our case, the fish had a honey comb and a Green Bay Packer Helmet to hide in.

Oh, and the mourning that goes on when a fish dies! What ever happened to flushing a dead fish down the toilet? It just doesn't happen in our house.

Our Carnival fish always have friends that join them. They come from the neighborhood pet store. Charlotte ended up with 4 friends. They were beautiful fantail fish, Casey, Bissy, Harper and Graham. Not original names since they belong to family members. Charlotte was replaced several time do to early demise. Poor Charlotte.

Charlotte is the little one. The Big Black one once lived in a drawer!

Alas, all of those fish have entered the great ocean in the sky. And they all had autopsies. Liver disease. So sad.

The 20 Gallon tank now has two Carnival Fish that my Grandson won 2 years ago, Two creepy oversized head fish from the store, and now Rover.

I asked Hope this morning what her new fish's name was, fully expecting her to say Cindy and she said..."It is Charlotte!"